Geography

So is the Hill Cumorah in New York or somewhere else entirely? This is maybe one of the most contentious points when it comes to Book of Mormon geography or even church history, just because people assume that like, oh, the Hill Cumorah is in New York.

Joseph Smith called it the Hill Cumorah.

That's like our pin in the map.

Is this like the fight for moon people? Yes, exactly.

New

Book of Mormon geography theory drops today,

guys.

The three Kimura theory, right? Yeah, uh-huh.

[laughs]

And, and she, she was quite nice, but everyone always says, "Geog..." No, no, not, not geography.

No.

Right.

We can there are all kinds of ways we can look around and see this.

We can see even though the rate of emissions growth is perhaps declining, depending on the way that we measure it and the geography, it's still growing year over year.

We're also building more renewable energy capacity than we've really ever built in human history each year.

And if leading us perhaps to this place that Emily Gruber, another CCI fellow, I feel like half the people in this book are CCI people.

To paint the contrast for you, in Hamilton, in the area of the city where the first hyperscaler proposal, where the company wants to build it, Life expectancy is something on the order, and this is not hyperbole, it's 20 years lower than other parts of Hamilton.

There was some research at Geographical.

Can you back that up? What did you just say? Can you just say that one more time? On average, people

in this area of the city live 20 years less than people in other wealthier, greener parts of the city.

Bueno, vamos a seguir ahora porque tenemos-- estábamos viendo sobre, sobre, eh-

Geografía.

Esta estructura, pero vamos a hablar ahora un poco de geografía, de lo interesante que es Japón.

A pesar de que sea una isla pequeña, tiene de todo.

My guest today is Mehran Gul, a technology and innovation expert who's worked with the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

He's the author of the recently released book, The New Geography of Innovation, the global contest for breakthrough technologies, which we'll be discussing today.

Mehran Gul, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

And you kind of take issue in the book with some of the ways that that's commonly been measured.

So can you talk about those measurement issues and also what you decided on as a measurement and why you feel that those metrics are better or the best that we have?

So the first thing that you have to grapple with when you write a book called The New Geography of Innovation is just what is innovation to begin with? And it ended up being a much harder question to answer than I thought it would be.

If you think about how people generally tend to talk about innovation, especially today, it usually tends to be talking about startups or venture-backed companies, new companies and things like that.

But regardless,

I say all that to say I am part of the geography

undisciplined.

So of course, us geographers, we're interdisciplinary.

And I guess that's what makes me a rogue, because in academia, the more like tunneled, the more, you know, precisely focused, the more you can feel like you are an authority on something.

But people who have been trained across disciplines like myself, which, you know, technically I have a PhD in geography, but my master's degree was in history, 19th century history, and my bachelor's degree was in women's and gender studies and psychology.

So we got the social sciences.

We got the humanities.